DICI-A Dictionary of Italian Collocations for Learners

The main objective of the project is to create and make public the DiCI-A (Dictionary of Italian Collocations for Learners), a dictionary of collocations designed specifically for L2 Italian learners. The DiCI-A aims to be a freely accessible digital dictionary, searchable through an interface accessible from both desktop and mobile devices. The project intends to fill a gap in the field of Italian lexicography, which currently does not offer collocation tools specifically for learners, based on balanced written and spoken corpora, and designed using rigorous statistical and lexicographic methods, with collocations graded according to proficiency level.

Some features of the dictionary are:

• it is corpus-based (the collocations are extracted from a reference corpus of contemporary Italian);
• it is based on statistical methodologies (collocations are filtered and ordered based on their frequency, their dispersion across the different textual genres in the corpus, and specific association measures);
• each collocation included in the DiCI-A is assigned to a level of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), and is accompanied by a definition and authentic examples;
• the structure of the dictionary conforms to the international standards of digital lexicography;
• the usability of the dictionary is ensured through a mobile application, which will allow learners to consult it in a guided and intuitive way, individually or also in the context of classroom learning. Consultation will also be available via a web platform.